The Kites

by Romain Gary

  He was short-staffed. Most of his kitchen assistants and employees had been drafted, replaced by the old guard who had, in solidarity — you might almost say patriotically — agreed to come out of retirement in these darker hours of our nation and maintain the service from which they’d departed so many years ago. Duprat had even managed to rally Monsieur Jean, the sommelier, who was nearly eighty-six.

  “It’s been a long time since I employed a sommelier,” he explained to me. “Sommeliers always seem so obligatory, if you see what I mean — it’s just irritating when they bear down on the customer with that wine list in their hand. But Jean knows what he’s doing and he can still hold down the front end of the restaurant.”

  I would arrive on my motorbike every morning at six. When he caught sight of my defeated face and my lost look, Marcellin would growl, “Come now, come along with me. This’ll bring you back down to earth.” I would take a seat in the van and we would drive through the countryside and the markets, where Duprat would inspect the vegetables. He would hold peapods to his ear and “listen for the crickets,” that is, see if they were crunchy; look to see whether the beans had “that velvet look,” choosing “black broad,” “Italian,” or “Chinese” beans according to their “tint”; or decide whether the cauliflowers were “worthy to appear.” Duprat served his vegetables whole — “proud,” as he put it. He had a horror of purees, which were coming into fashion at the time, as if France had a premonition of what was in store for it.

  “Everything’s puree these days,” he’d grumble. “Puree of celery root, puree of broccoli, of watercress, of onion, of green peas, of fennel … France is losing respect for the vegetable. Do you know what this is a sign of, this puree craze? Puree, my little Ludo. That’s what it’s a sign of. We’ll all end up in it, you’ll see.”

  It was above all with butchers that Marcellin Duprat revealed himself at his most demandingly imperious, especially when it came to his beloved Norman tripe. I saw him go white with rage because he suspected Monsieur Dullin — who years later, in 1943, was shot by a firing squad — of giving him tripe from two different cows.

  “Dullin,” he’d roared, “the next time you pull that will be the last time you see my face! Yesterday you stuck me with the tripe of two different oxen. How on earth could they possibly cook the same way? And you’d better take it as gospel that I want the foot off that very same ox!”

  He snickered when he saw the butcher presenting a housewife with a rolled veal shoulder, all nicely trussed up, a sight to behold.

  “You can bet they’ve stuffed the middle with fat to add weight — they’d throw in the hoofs and the horns if they could!”

  Going “back to the land” under the care of Marcellin Duprat did me good. I continued to see Lila, but more privately. I even learned to laugh and joke with others in order to hide her presence. Dr. Gardieu was pleased, even if my uncle suspected that I had simply gotten better at faking.

  “I know very well that you’re not over it — it’s incurable with our kind,” he would tell me. “And a good thing, too. Some cures bring you down lower than the sickness.”

  I was doing my best. I had to hold firm and it was Lila herself who demanded it of me. If I let myself go, I was certain to end up in despair, and that was the surest way to lose her.

  The Clos Joli was located just off the intersection of the road to Noisy and the road to Caen, across from the farthest outskirts of the hamlet of Ouvières, set back in a little garden where spring and summer met you with magnolias, lilacs, and roses. There were doves everywhere to “calm the customer,” as Duprat said. “I give people their money’s worth in my restaurant, but they feel good when they see a dove. For a while I had pigeons, but seeing a pigeon on the way into a restaurant — that just puts the client on edge.” For the same reason the cash desk, where I often worked, was set off to one side, slightly concealed from view.

  “You can’t start thinking about the bill as soon as you walk in. Some tact is required.”

  Sometimes, he would come and lean on the desk, in his full whites — “we haven’t changed uniforms since Lent” — and confide in me: “I’m holding firm, but things are going downhill, they’re going downhill,” he complained. “Now the fire’s bothering them. They’re complaining about the heat. A kitchen with no fire is like a woman with no ass. Fire is our father, the father of all the chefs in France. But some of them are switching to electricity now, and with automatic timers, no less. That’s like making love and checking your watch to see when it’s time to climax.”

  I noticed that the embroidered insignia on his jacket had changed. Where once it had said, “Marcellin Duprat, Clos Joli, France” in tricolor letters, it now said “Marcellin Duprat, France.” Writing “Clos Joli” and “France” must have seemed like tautology to him.

  In the kitchen, every pot bore the initials C. J. and a vintage in Roman numerals. His enemies liked to say he believed he was a descendent of the Caesars. He did not tolerate anyone saying “the kitchens.”

  “There’s a plural that stinks of hospitality. I say the place where I work is the kitchen. They’re out to multiply everything, these days.”

  At the entrance to the restaurant was a big map of France, with pictures of the products that were the crowning glory of each province. For Normandy, he had chosen tripe.

  “After all, that’s what makes a Frenchman. And French history.”

  His prices were steep. Minister Anatole de Monzie said to him one day, “My dear Marcellin, to taste your dishes is erotic; to see your prices is pornographic!”

  Duprat was criticized from the very beginning of the “Phony War.” People whispered that there was something indecent in the ongoing gastronomic fete being held at the Clos Joli while the enemy bayed at the door. Duprat shrugged with disdain.

  “Point is holding firm in Vienne, Dumaine in Saulieu, Pic in Valence, La Mère Brazier in Lyon, and I am here in Cléry,” he’d say. “Now more than ever, every man must give his best to the thing he does best.”

  Ambrose Fleury seemed to share this opinion. He had gone back to his kites with a determination that resembled a kind of declaration of faith. He had redone his “humanist” series: Rabelais, Erasmus, Montaigne, and Rousseau once again floated above the Norman woodlands. I watched my uncle’s strong hands making adjustments to the spars, spines, and sails; in the paper and strings of the kite’s body you could already begin to recognize some immortal figure of the Enlightenment. Jean-Jacques Rousseau was his favorite, it seemed: in his lifetime, it has been estimated that Ambrose Fleury assembled more than eighty of them.

  I sensed that he was right and that Duprat was, too. Now more than ever, everyone had to give the best of himself. I smiled, remembering those hours of our childhood when Lila, in the attic of Le Manoir des Jars, would predict our paths in life based on each of our gifts: “Tad will be a great explorer, he’ll discover Scythian warrior tombs and Aztec temples; Bruno will be as famous as Menuhin and Rubinstein; Hans will seize power in Germany and assassinate Hitler; and you — as for you …” She would look at me solemnly. “You’re going to love me,” she would tell me, and I still felt on my cheek the kiss that accompanied this revelation of my raison d’être.

  I announced to my uncle that I would not be returning to Duprat’s.

  “I’m going to Paris. It’s easier to get news there. Maybe I’ll try to make it into Poland.”

  “There is no more Poland,” said Ambrose Fleury.

  “Well, anyway, the Polish army is reforming in France. I’m sure I’ll manage to find something out. I’ve got hope.”

  My uncle lowered his eyes. “What do you want me to tell you? Go ahead. With our kind, hope is always the one to decide. That bastard — it never lets up.”

  When I returned to say goodbye, we stayed together in silence for a long moment; seated at his bench, with his old leather apron and his tools, he resembl
ed every old master craftsman in the history of France.

  “May I take one as a memento?” I asked.

  “Pick one.”

  I looked around me. The workshop was twenty-five yards long by ten yards wide, and the words that sprang to mind at the sight of those hundreds of kites were “an embarrassment of riches.” They were all too big for me, much easier to fit into memory than into a suitcase. I took a tiny little one, a dragonfly with iridescent wings.

  24

  I arrived in Paris with five hundred francs in my pocket and wandered for a long time through this city I didn’t know, in search of a place to live. I found a room for fifty francs a month, above a dance hall in the rue Cardinal-Lemoine.

  “I’ll give you a break on the rent because of the noise,” the landlord told me.

  The Polish officers and soldiers who had made it to France through Romania had been met with some condescension, and they answered my questions wearily: no, there was no Bronicki among them; I should inquire at the staff headquarters of the Polish army, which was regrouping at Coëtquidan. I went there every day, to rue de Solférino, and was politely turned away. I renewed my efforts at the Swedish and Swiss embassies, and the Red Cross. I had to leave my lodgings after I slapped the landlord across the face: he had told me we ought to come to terms with Hitler. “You’ve got to admit he’s a leader. We need a man like that.”

  His wife called the police, but I managed to get out before they arrived and found myself a hideout, a furnished room in the rue Lepic. My new digs were in a hotel frequented by prostitutes. The woman in charge was tall and thin, with dyed-black hair and a hard, straight gaze that made me feel scrutinized, studied, even searched. I rarely saw her without a pack of Gauloises in close reach, and without a cigarette dangling from one corner of her mouth — so much so that her face, in my memory, remains wreathed in smoke.

  Her name was Julie Espinoza.

  I spent all my time lying in my room: liberating Poland and holding Lila in my arms on the Baltic Coast.

  The day came when I no longer had the money to pay my rent. Instead of throwing me out, the madam invited me to eat with her in the kitchen every day. She chatted about one thing and another, asked no questions, and observed me attentively, stroking Chong, her Pekinese, a little creature with a black muzzle and brown-and-white fur, who always sat in her lap. Her inflexible gaze made me uneasy; her eyes always seemed to be on the lookout for something; her eyelashes made me think of spiders’ legs crouching in the depths of time. I learned that Madame Espinoza had a daughter who’d studied abroad.

  “In Heidelberg, in Germany,” she added, in a tone that sounded almost triumphant. “You see, my little Ludo? I knew what was going to happen. I’ve known since Munich. My girl has a degree that will come in very handy when the Germans show up.”

  “But …” I was going to say, “Your daughter’s Jewish like you, Madame Julie …” but she cut me off.

  “Yes, I know, but her papers are as Aryan as they come,” she proclaimed, one hand resting on Chong, who was curled up in a ball on her lap. “I had it seen to and she has the right kind of name. You’d better believe we’re not handing it over to them on a platter this time around. Not me, at any rate. Our kind has a thousand years of training and experience. Some of us have forgotten, or they think it’s all over and done with, that it’s civilization nowadays — what they call human rights, in the newspaper — but not me. I know what your human rights are. They’re roses. They smell nice, that’s all.”

  Julie Espinoza had spent several years as an assistant madam in the “houses” in Budapest and Berlin, and she spoke Hungarian and German. I noticed that she always wore the same brooch pinned to her dress, a little golden lizard, which she seemed very fond of. Whenever she was worried, she fiddled with it.

  “It’s lovely, your lizard,” I remarked to her one day.

  “Lovely, schmovely — the lizard is an animal that has survived since the beginning of time, and when it comes to slipping off between the rocks it can’t be beat.”

  She had a manly voice, and when she was upset she swore like a cattle drover — they say “like a cattle drover,” but I came from cattle country and I’d never heard anyone use language like that — and sometimes her talk became so vulgar that it would end up bothering Madame Julie herself. One night, she stopped short in the midst of a modest “dammit to hell” followed by some other words I prefer not to write, out of respect and gratitude to the woman to whom I owe so much. Interrupting her own diatribe, which had to do with some sort of trouble with the housing authorities, she reflected, “It’s funny, when you think about it — it only comes to me in French. Never came to me in Hungarian or German. Maybe I didn’t have the vocabulary. Then again, in Buda and Berlin it was a different clientele. The best kind of people. They’d come in tuxedos sometimes, or even frock coats, straight from the opera or the theater, and they’d kiss your hand. Here, they’re just garbage.”

  She looked pensive.

  “This won’t do at all,” she declared firmly. “I can’t allow myself to be vulgar.”

  And she concluded with this mysterious sentence, most likely a slip of the tongue, because she hadn’t yet accorded me her full trust: “It’s a matter of life and death.”

  She took her pack of Gauloises from the table and departed, leaving me bewildered. I didn’t see how a dirty mouth could seem like such a threat to her.

  My bewilderment turned to stupefaction when, at her advanced age, she began taking comportment lessons. An old maid who had once been the director of a boarding school for young ladies appeared twice a week to help her acquire what she called “class,” a word that awoke in my memory the worst of my humiliations in Gródek: the episode of the stolen objects, my relationship with Hans, and that asshole Stas Bronicki — to use Madame Julie’s terms — and his solemn warning, his unreserved assent to his daughter’s taking me as a lover, accompanied by an invitation to me to banish any mad hope I might have of marrying Lila, given my humble origins and the elevated distinction of the Bronicki name. My irritation grew when I heard Madame Julie’s tutor explaining to her what she meant by “class”: “It is not enough, you see, to adopt behavior that differs from that of the lower levels of society. Quite the contrary, in fact: it should never appear to have been acquired. It must seem utterly natural — inborn, as it were.”

  I was outraged by the affable smile with which Madame Julie accepted these remonstrations — the very same woman I’d so often heard bawling out a customer who had “taken liberties.” She was very obedient, displaying not the least bit of impatience. I would come across her reciting La Fontaine fables with a pencil clenched between her teeth, or pursed in her lips, stopping regularly to greet an arriving couple, which happened often, since each of her girls saw easily fifteen or twenty customers a day.

  “Apparently I have a street accent. You know — Pigalle. That old grasshopper calls it ‘popular speech,’ and she’s giving me exercises to get rid of it. I know I look like a jackass, but what can I say? You do what you have to do.”

  “Why are you going to so much trouble, Madame Julie? It’s none of my business, but …”

  “I have my reasons.”

  The way she walked troubled her a good deal, as well.

  “I look like a guy,” she acknowledged.

  It was a kind of roll, from one leg to the other, shoulders swinging, forearms forward, elbows out; it was, it’s true, a walk with nothing feminine about it, bearing a certain resemblance to the stance used by professional wrestlers in the ring. Mademoiselle de Fulbillac emphatically deplored it.

  “You can’t go out in the world like that!”

  So it was that I began to see the boss moving prudently from one corner of the sitting room to another, with three or four books balanced atop her head.

  “Hold yourself nice and straight, Madame,” ordered Mademoiselle de Fulbillac,
whose father had been a naval officer. “And if you please, avoid the cigarette between your lips. There’s nothing so ill-bred.”

  “Shit,” Madame Julie would say when the pyramid of books came tumbling noisily down. And right away she would add, “I’ve got to get rid of this dirty mouth. Anything could pop out at the wrong moment. I’ve said ‘shit’ so many times in my life it’s like second nature to me.”

  Her physique was not “of our kind,” as Mademoiselle de Fulbillac had remarked to me on several occasions; to me, there was something gypsylike about her. Many years later, when I had acquired a little learning in the arts, I found that Julie Espinoza’s traits resembled the faces of women in Byzantine mosaics, and the wooden effigies painted on the sarcophagi at Sakkara. It was, at any rate, a face from very ancient times.

  Once, as I entered the office where customers would come and pay for their rooms before going upstairs, I found Julie Espinoza seated behind the counter, an open history book in her hand. Eyes closed, a finger resting on one of the book’s pages, she was reciting, as if from a lesson she was struggling to learn by heart, “… It may therefore be said that Admiral Horthy became regent of Hungary very much in spite of himself … His popularity, already great in …” She glanced down at the textbook. “Already great in 1917, following the battle of Otranto, soared to such heights that, having crushed the Bolshevik Revolution of Béla Kun in 1919, he could only bow to popular opinion …”

  She noticed my surprise. “What?”

  “Nothing, Madame Julie.”

  “Mind your own beeswax.” She fiddled with her little golden lizard, then softened, adding tranquilly, “I’m practicing for when the Germans get here.”

  The certainty of the tone with which she announced the unthinkable to me — that France might lose the war, in other words — left me beside myself, and I stormed off, slamming the door behind me.